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Original Research
WHAT ARE STATUES GOOD FOR? WINNING THE
BATTLE OR LOSING THE BATTLEGROUND?
Author:
A. Goodrich1
P. Bombardella1
Affiliation:
1
School of Philosophy, NorthWest University, Potchefstroom
Campus
Correspondence to:
André Goodrich
Postal Address:
Faculty of Arts
Potchefstroom Campus, NorthWest University
Potchefstroom 2531
Email:
[email protected]
Correspondence to:
Pia Bombardella
Postal Address:
Faculty of Arts
Potchefstroom Campus, NorthWest University
Potchefstroom 2531
Email:
[email protected]
Dates:
15 Dec. 2016
How to cite this article:
Goodrich, A & Bombardella,
P, 2016. "What are statues
good for? Winning the battle
or losing the battleground?".
KOERS — Bulletin for Christian
Scholarship, 81(3). Available
at: https://doi.org/10.19108/
KOERS.81.3.2272
Copyright:
© 2016. The Author(s).
Published under the Creative
Commons Attribution License.
In South Africa the practice of toppling statues is as old as the practice of erecting them. The most
recent episode in this history began in 2015 with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at the University
of Cape Town, from where it rapidly spread to sites throughout South Africa. Confronted with
the fact that 97% of South Africa’s 3500 declared heritage sites related to white values and
experiences at the end of the apartheid era and that there has been little progress towards crafting
a more representative heritage landscape, one cannot dispute the Rhodes Must Fall assertion that
South African statues anachronistically honour the leading figures of South Africa’s colonial and
apartheid past. Observing that public debate around the statues was rapidly polarised into two
camps, those who would defend the statues and those who would destroy them, this paper argues
that neither option sufficiently addresses the multiple meanings of statues. By examining the
changing public history discourses of the 20th century we propose a third approach grounded in
post humanist arguments about the limitation of critique and the promise of care as an ethical,
affective and practical pursuit. We argue that this post humanist approach to the question of
what to do with statues in South Africa is capable of transforming them from fetishised objects
of offence or of heritage into points around which new publics can gather and through which the
historical ontology of contemporary power dynamics can be accessed, interrogated and acted upon
in order to build new forms of citizenship.
KEYWORDS: Fetish, post humanism, heritage, statues, public, Rhodes must fall.
In Suid-Afrika is die praktyk van standbeelde omgooi net so oud soos die praktyk om hulle op
te rig. Die mees onlangse episode in hierdie geskiedenis het in 2015 in Kaapstad begin met die
Rhodes Must Fall veldtog by die Universiteit van Kaapstad en daarvandaan het dit vining versprei
na plekke dwarsoor Suid-Afrika. Gesien in die lig van feit dat teen die einde van die apartheidera
97% van Suid-Afrika se 3500 erfenisplekke verwant was aan blanke waardes en ervaringe en dat
daar min vordering was met die daarstelling van ‘n meer verteenwoordigende erfenislandskap,
kan mens nie wegkom van Rhodes Must Fall stelling dat Suid-Afrikaanse beelde ‘n anachronistiese
vereringis van die leidende figure van Suid-Afrika se koloniale en apartheidsverlede. Gegewe
dat die openbare debat vining gepolariseer geraak het in twee kampe, naamlik diegene wat die
beelde woul beskerm en diegene wat hulle wou vernietig, is die argument wat aangevoer word in
hierdie artikel dat nie een van die opsies voldoende handel met die veelvuldige betekenisse van
beelde nie. Deur ‘n ondersoek te doen na die veranderende openbare diskoerse oor geskiedenis in
die 20ste eeu stel ons ‘n derde benadering voor, wat ingebed is in post-humanistiese argumente
oor die beperkinge van kritiek en ‘n sorgbelofte as ‘n etiese, affektiewe en praktiese benadering.
Ons argumenteer naamlik dat die post-humanistiese benadering tot wat mens moet doen met
beelde in Suid-Afrika is om hulle te omvorm van fetisjistiese voorwerpe wat aanstoot gee of van
erfenisvoorwerpe tot plekke rondom nuwe publieke kan vergader en waardeur die historiese
ontologie wat kontemporêre magsdinamiek benader kan word, ondersoek en oor gehandel word
om so nuwe vorme van burgerskap te bou.
SLEUTELWOORDE: Fetisj, post-humanisme, erfenis, beelde, publiek, Rhodes must fall.
www.koersjournal.org.za
doi.org/10.19108/KOERS.81.3.2272
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Original Research
In South Africa the practice of toppling statues is as old as
the practice of erecting them. The opening act of this now
highly public symbolic battle took place when indigenous
South Africans toppled the first monument erected on South
African soil – the stone cross erected by Vasco da Gama in
1497 (Marschall, 2010:19). Da Gama responded with cannon
fire, and the rest, as they say, is history. In this history the
cannons prevailed so that by the end of the 20th century there
were around 3500 declared heritage sites in South Africa
(Marschall, 2010:21).
Rassool’s point has much in common with Latour’s (2004)
suggestion that we replace “matters of fact” with “matters
of concern”. The former, he suggests are arrived at by using
such tools as the “syndrome of discovery” to cut away reality
until all that remains is a quite unreal and disconnected object
called a fact. As Rassool (2010:83) shows in his criticism of
Van Onselen’s Kas Maine biography, the syndrome of discovery
leads to the reality of Kas Maine’s experiences being cut away
until all that remains is an historically verifiable set of facts that
can stand as “the remembrance of real collective experience”.
The bulk of these were examples of colonial British and Cape
Dutch architecture and sites associated with the Afrikaner
struggle for self-determination. By 1992, 97% of declared
national monuments related to the values and experiences
of the white minority. The National Monuments Act of 1969
provided no protection for the heritage of living communities
because it inherited a focus on architecture, prehistoric and
archaeological sites and artefacts from the earlier Relics Act of
1934 (Meskell & Scheemeyer, 2008: 155). Archaeological sites
in South Africa, however, fell outside the apartheid historical
narrative. As the fate of the Mapangubwe golden rhino
illustrates, much of the Iron Age history of SA could not be
publicly recognized as heritage because it directly contradicted
the myth that black South Africans arrived in SA at around the
same time as the whites. Rock art sites, therefore, took up most
of the remaining 3%.
On the side of ideology, in 1910, the newly formed South African
Union was, to borrow the phrase from Meskell and Scheermeyer
(2008: 153), a “state in search of a nation”. In that context,
heritage emerged as a national project and “key component of
Afrikaner cultural rightist nationalism” (Shepherd & Murray,
2007:4). Witz (1999 & 2003) has slightly complicated this
picture arguing that two large festivals illustrate two tendencies
within this early 20th century project of discovering a nation
for what would become the apartheid state. The first festival
focused on the production of an Afrikaner “volk” imaginary by
constructing and commemorating the shared experience of the
great trek. The 1938 Great Trek Festival left a trail of monuments
scattered across the country and culminated in the laying of the
Voortrekker Monument’s foundation stone in Pretoria. It is at
this culmination of the trek festival that the central character of
this paper, Totius, makes his first appearance.
Stuart Hall (2005:24) describes heritage as “the material
embodiment of the spirit of the nation” because in the British
tradition that South Africa inherited, artefacts are only
authorized as valuable enough to declare as heritage when they
fit into the unfolding of an official national story. This skewed
heritage landscape was, thus, the result of two things: the
first, ideological, relating to the authorized national story; the
second, practical, relating to a privileging of tangible heritage.
In The Rise of Afrikanerdom, Dunbar Moodie (1975) locates the
origins of the “sacred history” of Afrikaner nationalism in Boer
suffering during the South African war, as exemplified in the
unveiling of the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein in 1913.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, that “sacred
history” was pushed back in time and the Great Trek was reenvisaged as the act from which Afrikanerdom was born.
The 1938 Great Trek festival was central to this re-envisaged
national cosmology and Totius (J.D. du Toit), Langenhoven and
D.F. Malherbe were the central figures who, in speeches at the
festival’s culmination established “the intimate theological
connection” between the Great Trek and the epic origin of
Afrikanerdom (Moodie,1975:19).
On the side of practice, South Africa’s skewed heritage
landscape is the result of two practical features of heritage.
The first, mentioned above, is the inherited British privileging
of material objects of artistic, archaeological or architectural
significance (Marschall, 2010:21). The second is what Depelchin
(2005:123) has termed the “syndrome of discovery”. The term
describes the dominant trend in the production of African
history by outsiders. In this mode, truths are discovered
according to rules of evidence deriving from broader relations
of domination in disciplines that “deal with social reality from
the perspective of the dominant group”.
While South Africa might have new stories to tell, heritage
practices have been resistant to the telling. On this front, we
argue that the experiences in Eastern Europe give only scant
suggestions as to how to approach symbolic landscapes, as we
need a different mode for imagining our past. We will argue
that the 2015 statue politics offer some useful clues for how to
begin thinking about the practical aspect of building symbolic
landscapes able to meet what Rassool has suggested is the
primary challenge of public history, to enable new forms of
citizenship (2000:1, 2010:96).
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Prior to the centenary festival, Afrikaners had been politically
divided. The symbolic second trek, culminating in an event
attended by 100 000 people at the site of the Voortrekker
monument contributed greatly to uniting Afrikaners around
a mythical origin narrative. After the Eeufees celebrations, the
Afrikaner Broederbond organized a second public meeting
at the site of the Voortrekker monument. More than 70 000
people attended and Van Rooy presented the main speech
celebrating how the second symbolic great trek had unified
the volk. Totius was once again a central figure and read
a declaration calling for a renewal of the covenant.
In this solemn hour in which the air about us quivers
with emotion, in which the raiment of praise replaces
an anxious spirit, in which a holy fire spatters its
sparks from soul to soul, we stand where less than a
year ago we stood bound together as a nation. Now,
however, we have not only a wish in our heart, but
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the very deed of volkseenheid [ethnic solidarity] before
our eyes. In this hour, in which we acknowledge and
confess with inexpressible gratitude that God alone
is the Awakener of our nation, we wish to declare
that the God of our fathers gave us righteous decrees
and trustworthy laws, but we must also acknowledge
that we as a People have departed from them with
the result that we have one and all not only neglected
our high ethnic calling but also quarrelled with one
another. We wish with this declaration to reveal our
desire and seal our longing constructively ... to serve
our People. We grasp one another’s hand on the Path
of South Africa, never again to let go. This we declare
solemnly by raising our hands (Moodie, 1975:194,
emphasis added).
During the 1940s, Totius remained a leading figure in the
construction of what Moodie refers to as Afrikaner civil
religion. This religion was based on moving the cosmology
of Afrikanderdom back from the Boer suffering at the hands
of the British during the South African War to the Great Trek.
It was the work of nationalistic intellectuals like Totius that
transformed the Trek into a divine exodus by reframing it in
biblical terms. Leaving aside such motivating factors as the
change in legislation pertaining to slavery, Totius framed the
Trek as answering the volk’s “high ethnic calling”. Re-casting
the Trek as a divine calling enabled the producers of Afrikaner
civil religion to liken the volk they were working to create with
the Israelites, and frame them as God’s chosen people.
Leaving the Cape was thus cast as fulfilling a “high ethnic
calling”, and the contested stories of the Trek were replaced
by a monolithic factually informed narrative solidified in
the beautifully chiselled stone panels of the Voortrekker
Monument and reproduced in History textbooks. The story of
the Great Trek, then, was the story of a volk that left the Cape
because God had called them to do so. The men who left, and
took with them their wives, children and slaves were recast
as pioneers answering a divine call to bring light to the “dark
morass”, and in doing so fulfil their “high ethnic calling”.
Motivated by the need to consolidate political power in an
electoral base broader that the divine ethnic solidarity Totius
was central in constructing, the second festival worked to
establish a shared white settler identity beyond the Brit/
Boer division. The Van Riebeeck Festival in 1952, therefore,
shifted the focus of public historical commemoration away
from ethnic concerns and consciously attempted to craft a
shared white identity by inaugurating Jan Van Riebeeck as the
civilizing founder of modern South Africa (Witz, 1999:188).
Both of these tendencies proceeded according to what Rassool
(2010:96) has called the “syndrome of discovery”. In both cases,
a set of concerns, first the concern with uniting the Afrikaner
volk, second the concern with creating a shared white identity
animated the cutting away of reality to discover the facts.
As Latour (2004:247) reminds us, “all matters of fact require, in
order to exist, a bewildering variety of matters of concern”.
Statues and monuments have widely been approached as
“key elements of cultural landscapes linked to the political
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Original Research
inscription of public space” (Light & Young, 2011: 493).
The 3500 heritage sites declared before the end of apartheid
can thus be argued to be centrally important in the cementing
of the narrative that Totius was so central in contriving.
Thotse (2010: 174) has, for example, argued that the city text is
a symbolic battleground for political control over space in the
post apartheid context.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the dominant mode of
engaging with the question of what to do with statues has
been a textual approach – reading them as symbolic objects
legitimizing a hegemonic order. We argue, differently, that
while this textual approach cannot be ignored, it is a limiting
frame. It cannot be ignored because it reveals underlying
power relations, but it is limiting because it fails to admit the
reality of those connections by making itself guilty of the same
critical gestures that characterize the “syndrome of discovery”.
It makes itself guilty of this by unfolding according to what
Latour (2004: 237) identifies as the association of criticism with
anti-fetishism in terms of which the critic’s role becomes that
of showing that “what naïve believers are doing with objects is
simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that
does nothing all by itself”. So the dispute gets stuck in the
realm of competing fact/fetish claims.
According to the textual approach we are trying to move away
from, building a new political order requires inculcating
in a population a new historical narrative that legitimizes
present distributions of power. As such, transformed political
circumstances, particularly in the wake of totalitarian regimes,
affect the lives statues lead. The official symbolic landscape
onto which the values of the ousted political order have been
projected and given stability must be removed when the
time comes to imagine community differently. And there are
numerous international examples of this.
On 17 March 2005, three decades after his death, the seven
metre tall statue of Franco was removed from a Madrid square
it had dominated since 1959. At the time of the removal, which
began at 2am, “A small neo-fascist group protested against the
removal of the statue while an even smaller group of supporters
of the action cheered on” (Hadzelek, 2012:159). The removal
itself passed without much concern. As the following day
wore on, however, the absent statue gathered around itself
a passionate public.
Falange, the Fascist party once headed by Franco, rallied 700
people to a protest at the site. People adorned the now empty
plinth with flowers and flags, the international news media
covered these proceedings and the quiet removal, kept secret
even from city officials, erupted into a national debate about
memory and commemoration. On one side of the debate was
the position that the statue was shameful and ought to have
been removed. On the other was the position maintaining
that the removal would reopen wounds long healed
(Hadzelek, 2012:160). This debate was significant in that
it breached an agreement that prevailed in Spain after the
transition to democracy. Political organizations agreed to
refrain from using historical conflicts in their party politics
and citizens were asked to keep their traumatic experiences
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out of the public realm (Hadzelek, 2012: 163). This agreement,
reinforced by amnesty legislation, produced a national amnesia
against the backdrop that attempts at justice or reparations
would spark retribution.
The pact of silence in the Spanish case above contrasts
somewhat with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. However, in the South African case it was not
a pact of silence that introduced amnesia, it was a mode of
imagining the past. We are talking about the transformation
of history into multicultural heritage, with an emphasis on
healing. To be sure, we do not want to take all of heritage under
a single umbrella and take note that “heritage can be seen as
an assemblage of arenas and activities of history-making that
is as disputatious as the claims made about the character of
academic history” (Rassool, 2000:5). But in apartheid’s wake,
the past came to be “imbued with seemingly therapeutic powers
that claimed to heal the state and its citizens economically,
socially, and spiritually” (Meskell, 2012:2). We will argue that
care, as articulated by Haraway (2003) and Puig (2012) might
productively replace the emphasis on healing.
Heritage imagined as a unifying therapy, of course, has
a history. Beginning in the late 1980s, repressing inconvenient
historical details to celebrate South African multiculturalism in
order to heal a divided nation began emerging as what Rassool
(2000) would later describe as the dominant set of discourses
through which to read the nation and its history. Critically, the
healing and the wound to be healed were imagined to exist in
the realm of symbol. Rassool (2010:96) has strongly criticized
how heritage unfolded in many instances according to the
“syndrome of discovery”, thereby disabling what he saw as
public history’s primary challenge, that of enabling new forms
of citizenship. Witz (2003) identifies this set of discourses as
the third major public historical tendency in the 20th century.
As the project of dismantling apartheid began to take
meaningful shape, the National Party orchestrated the clearest
example of this turning towards a new ‘multicultural’ public
history, the 1988 Dias festival commemorating the 500th year
since Dias first rounded the Cape en route to the East (Witz,
2006:162-163).
Dias literally fired the first killing shot in the history of
colonial violence that would follow in his ship’s wake (Witz,
2006: 178). This inconvenient detail was written out of the
festival pageantry in favour of a programme celebrating cultural
diversity with performances of Italian and Indian dancers
alongside gumboot dancers and a Malay choir (Witz, 2006: 172).
The 1988 celebration of Portuguese exploration is perhaps the
proto example of the colours of the rainbow concealing, for the
purposes of healing, the violence and inequality underpinning
South Africa’s oppressive multiculturalism. Multicultural
heritage as a mode of public history, then, was from its official
beginnings, as Meskell and Scheermire (2008:154) assert, more
concerned with national performance than with social justice.
Multiculturalism here became a fit-for-purpose reconciliatory
trope that enabled a celebration of the diacritics of South
Africa’s ethnic diversity but that foreclosed on the possibility
of engaging with the interdependent relations of power and
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Original Research
domination that linked these diverse categories into an unequal
society. Indeed, so fraught were the relations between these
groups at the time of the festival, that to colour it anything
other than exclusively white, whites had to paint themselves
black to perform the first multicultural contact between
Europe and indigenous South Africans. History performed
on the multiculturalist stage according to a Nationalist script,
as a pageant of contact between categories imagined as largely
separate and distinct, was an indication of things to come.
Meskell and Scheermeyer (2008:154) have argued that this
heritage mode has assigned the past to a “precarious limbo”
as all manner of stakeholders struggle to transform it into
an object that can be mobilized in service of such goods as
empowerment, restitution or social justice. Missing from their
account, however, is how this precarious limbo was also filled
with those who would try to mobilize the past in service of
preserving their privilege.
When the end of apartheid failed to revitalize academic history
in the way that many imagined might follow the collapse of the
apartheid metanarrative and student numbers began dropping,
history as an academic discipline turned to heritage for its
therapeutic powers. It was in this moment, after witnessing
Johan Marnitz’s 1998 heritage day account of Afrikaners’
fight against British domination that Jane Carruthers (1998)
raised a concern that heritage offered a serious challenge to
professional history. Heritage may well have opened the door
for some new stories in terms of which citizenship could be
asserted, empowerment and restitution sought and social
justice served, but it also enabled the transformation of the
apartheid mythology into cultural heritage as a post critical
fact that could continue to enliven Totius’ “high ethnic calling”.
In 2014 Tokolos Stencils, a Cape Town-based group of graffiti
activists responded to this preservation of privilege by spraying
the words ‘Disown this heritage’ in red across the base of Cape
Town’s Paul Kruger Statue. The point that they were trying
to make was that while statues of Kruger and other colonial
figures might represent white South Africans’ heritage, South
African racial inequality is rooted in the order these figures
represent.
One way of understanding why white South Africans should
consider disowning this heritage is colonial sovereignty’s
relationship to violence (Mbembe, 2001:25). Mbembe specifies
three types of violence upon which colonial sovereignty rests.
The first and most obvious is the direct violence of conquest.
The second is the violence of legitimation in terms of which
conquest and colonial rule are rendered legitimate. The third
is reiterative violence by which the colonized is daily reminded
of his or her position as conquered and subordinate. We would
add, drawing from Feldman (1994), the violence of omission,
perhaps a type of legitimating violence, omission, such as
writing Dias’s killing shot out of the 1988 festival, legitimizes
the status quo by writing out the violent interdependencies
upon which it is contingent. In the spaces of everyday life it is
particularly the racism of reiterative violence that inflicts the
colonial wound that Mignolo (2005:8) argues defines Fanon’s
wretched of the earth. It is this violence that “gave the natives a
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clear notion of themselves in proportion to the power they had
lost” (Mbembe, 2001:26).
Within this understanding of colonial sovereignty, the symbolic
landscape does the work of legitimation and reiteration while
the heritage modality does the work of omission. By violently
assigning the standards of classification, violently assigning
themselves the right to classify and violently asserting the
power to name the world accordingly, colonial governments
were able to write into the landscape a narrative of civilization
and position colonized people within that narrative. In the
context of colonial sovereignty the nationalist narrative of
a “high ethnic calling” rendered as heritage obscures the
interdependencies defined by the matrix of power that Quijano
(2007), Mignolo (2007 and 2009) and Escobar (2007) term
coloniality.
As Mignolo (2007) argues, colonial accumulation depended on
direct violence. The primitive accumulation that characterized
colonial capitalism required disposable labour, and
disposability relied on the production of a categorical system
in terms of which disposable life could be legitimized.
Colonialism, and the capitalist systems it enacted required
racism. Legitimizing these classificatory schemes fell to
colonial intellectuals who crafted a hierarchical categorical
system that transformed geographic diversity into the temporal
continuity we know as “progress”. Europe’s Others were not
simply different, they were backward; living artefacts of
Europe’s own past. Through this act of containing the diversity
of the world in the narrative of progress, a matrix in terms of
which human value could be distributed and justified was
established. The political economy of this process in South
Africa have been dealt with by Wolpe (1972) and Magubane
(1979) among others and the central role of ethnic subjectivity
in legitimizing this political economy has been discussed by
Comaroff and Comaroff (1997) and by David Bunn (2001).
Putting Mbembe and Mignolo together we can argue that
statues etching a colonial narrative into the past should go
and the world should be renamed because every statue and
street name, every mountain range and river named by the
conquerors enacts the colonial wound; reminds native people
of their position in the colonial matrix of power; leads them
to know themselves in proportion to what they have lost.
So a statue of Rhodes reiterates the work of the magnate
in entrenching and profiting from colonial violence in
South Africa. The statue also legitimizes that conquest by
subverting its horrors under the general good of economic
progress. Rhodes was central to building a Southern African
economy and Southern African states. He is a true hero of
progress. But as the massacre of mine-workers in Marikana
illustrated, violence and super-exploitation via a migrant
political economy1 have far outlived Rhodes.
Original Research
Bauman (2007:6-7) has argued that the divorce between politics
and power produced a condition of negative globalization.
What he means by this is that the ability of political institutions
such as parliaments to direct what happens in the world has
been radically diminished as capital, people and information
increasingly straddle state borders. Representational institutions such as parliaments are increasingly incapable of
dealing with citizens’ concerns inasmuch as these have come
to span the globe in quite hybrid ways. Were the police at
Marikana acting for London-based Lonmin, or in the interests
of South African citizens? Speaking of the resulting ambience
of uncertainty, Latour makes the point that in representational
democracies we have all become politically disabled.
Totius’s arrival on and departure from the Potchefstroom
Campus affords the opportunity to ask if statues might, in the
context of our political disability serve as political prostheses.
In 2009 a statue of the Afrikaner poet and theologian, Jacob
Daniel du Toit, better known as Totius, was relocated onto the
Potchefstroom Campus of the North-West University from its
isolated and neglected site alongside one of Potchefstroom’s
public roads. A statue of a central figure in the creation of
Afrikaner civil religion, of course exercises a legitimizing and
reiterative function vis-à-vis apartheid.
The idea to erect a Totius statue came from the Junior
Rapportryers in the late 1960s. In 1972 a Totius committee
was formally established in Potchefstroom under the
chairmanship of Prof Tjaart van der Walt, the then rector of the
Reformed Theological School of the Potchefstroom University.
The committee’s task was to plan events and memorials
in preparation for the 1977 centenary of Totius’s birth.
The committee planned a museum, a commemorative garden
and a monument. For the museum, the rector’s residence
in Molen Street was to be restored and converted into what
is today the Totius House Museum. Establishing the Totius
commemorative garden required convincing the Town Council
to do extensive groundworks and install an irrigation system
in preparation for planting trees and plants featured in Totius’s
poetry. The site was chosen because it was within walking
distance of the rector’s residence and because he spent time
walking and fishing there.
The committee envisaged that the commemorative garden
would serve as a backdrop for the planned monument and statue
for which they had started raising funds. The Potchefstroom
Herald of Friday 4 June 1971 outlined the plans for the Totius
commemorative garden, showing how work towards the Totius
festival had started prior to the formal creation of a committee.
The article reported that the costs for the project would be
in the order of R100 000 with annual maintenance costs of
between R10 000 and R12 000. Creating the commemorative
supply of African migrant labour-power, at a wage below its cost
1
According to Wolpe (1972) and Magubane (1979) South Africa’s
of reproduction” (Wolpe, 1972:425). This formulation established
homeland system subordinated the pre-capitalist economy into
a political economy of dispossession in which the capitalist
the capitalist economy to create a single economic system in which
mode systematically looted the pre-capitalist mode in a system of
the subordinated pre-capitalist economy subsidized the costs of
accumulation based on dispossession rather than on exploitation at
reproducing the labour force thereby enabling lower wages. South
the point of production. Bond (2007: 2) terms this state of permanent
Africa’s capitalist mode of production was, thus, founded upon “the
primitive accumulation “super-exploitation”.
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garden required laying underground drainage pipes, sinking
a borehole to water the garden, and planting an extensive lawn.
Establishing the Totius memorial garden therefore required
buy-in, investment and long-term commitment from local
council, as the garden’s aim to commemorate Totius, and to
serve as a pleasant and attractive public space demanded
regular and costly maintenance.
In February 1977 Mrs Rupert officially opened the Totius
House Museum. On the same day a pageant involving
local schoolchildren and soldiers from the Potchefstroom
military base culminated with Prime Minister Advocate B.J.
Vorster unveiling the Totius statue. By the time we moved to
Potchefstroom in 2005 the Totius commemorative garden had
become a veld criss-crossed by informal footpaths marking it a
transitory space of shortcuts. The ‘veld by the Wasgoedspruit’
was not a place where people lingered to relax or retreat as they
might in a public garden. Gone were the almost one hundred
trees planted by schoolchildren and students in August 1973
(Volksblad, 24 August 1973). There was no remaining evidence
of the expensive irrigation system and infrastructure installed
at the site in the 1970s. Under a democratic dispensation the site
had changed from the sacred garden for the Adam of Afrikaner
civil religion, into the neglected wilderness of a fall from grace.
Years before, in an effort to come to terms with campus
politics after our arrival in the NWU’s Anthropology subject
group, we had read Theuns Eloff’s short book about race and
reconciliation. From it, and other sources we learned that Totius
was the theologian who had argued the divine justification for
racial segregation in a speech at the 1944 volkskongres, which
met to discuss Afrikaner racial policy.
As a prolific poet and ideologue he played an important role
in constructing Afrikaner ethnicity as a divine calling. As
a theologian, however, he led the biblical justification for
apartheid, through reading the bible according to what Snyman
(2009:9) characterises as objectivist orthodox theology. Totius
opened his 1944 speech with the following:
‘Give me a Bible text,’ says the opponent of our
colour policy, ‘a text that proves that segregation is
in agreement with the utterances of Holy Scripture.’
‘I have no text,’ is my answer. ‘Then I have won the
case, says the advocate for equality’ … I answer: …
‘I don’t have a text, but I have the Bible, the whole
Bible. My argumentation would proceed from
Genesis to Revelation (Volsoo, 2015:196, translation of
Totius’s opening remarks at the 1944 Volkskongres at
Bloemfontein on Race Policy).
Totius proceeded to draw on Geneses 1, to .argue that God acts
as the skeidingmaker (divider). God the ‘great divider’ separates
light from dark, land from water, living creatures. In doing so
Totius transformed the cosmology of Genesis into a divine
justification for apartheid racial policy.
After coming to know Totius for his roles in limiting Afrikaner
identity to a biblical expression and in biblically justifying
apartheid segregation we opposed the introduction of the
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statue onto the Potchefstroom campus. To no effect we voiced
this opposition on the then very active internal bulletin board
service and in a passing conversation to the then campus rector
Professor Combrink. We appealed to the university to disown
this heritage.
The statue was erected outside the Faculty of Law and campus
life proceeded without taking much note of the new addition.
Making the best of a bad situation, we decided to honestly take
ownership of this heritage. We immediately put Totius to work
in our lectures on race and racism in South Africa. Our students
could go and look at the man who worked to make racism
divine. He was a useful bronze embodiment of the contingent
history by which a particularly terrible construction of race was
made. We took ownership by making him a concrete reminder
that racism was not divinely ordained; that the racist social
order was not ‘normal’ but normalized in part by his biblical
justification.
Beyond anthropology lecture theatres the statue took on
other changed meanings. He became the popular backdrop
for graduation photos, largely due to his position alongside
a fountain outside the campus’s most picturesque building. In
that way he was incorporated into a new ‘tradition’. But many
students had no idea who the statue represented. Informal
polls in class revealed that many students thought the statue
was of former ZAR President Pretorius. Others thought it
a statue of Hendrik Verwoerd – in fact, a representative of
the city council is rumoured to have told the NWU that the
Verwoerd Statue was ready to be moved on the day that the
statue was transported. It is not possible to suggest that the
statue was simply representative of a hegemonic nationalist
order on the campus – but it is no more possible to dismiss the
reading of colonial statues offered above.
Totius’s usefulness for teaching the contingency of South
Africa’s racist configuration was aided by a photo we took of
an outsourced black worker cleaning bird shit off the statue.
We used it to teach students that the South African modernity
of which his statue is metonymic depended on exploitable
labour and that his scientific work to justify racism as divine
contributed to making some human life dispensable enough
to legitimise that high degree of exploitation. The photo also
allowed us to bring home to students the irony of South Africa’s
liberation – a liberation in which a racialised system of exploited
labour still benefits racial inequality’s architects. To put this
into Mignolo’s terms, Totius afforded a good opportunity to
teach students how the rhetoric of modernity, the story of
progress and prosperity, depends on the logic of coloniality.
What Totius taught our students was that modernity’s progress
and abundance are inextricably woven into the logic that
makes some bodies dispensable in service of the production
upon which that abundance depends.
Science fiction author Neal Stephenson (1992), in his novel
Snowcrash, points out the connection between shit and science.
Both share skei, to cut or to split, as a root. Science, he suggests is
the practice of cutting falsehood away from truth while shitting
is the practice of splitting waste away from what is useful. There
is deep irony attached to a precariously employed man scraping
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animal waste off the man whose scientific work included
legitimising a classificatory order that made the cleaner’s
ancestors waste to be scraped off the shoulders of urban South
Africa in a campaign of forced removals that confined them to
townships and homelands. Totius’s scientific work served the
logic that made this man removable and dispensable in service
of the rhetoric of a nationalist modernity that Totius’s public
intellectual work painted as as divinely ordained.
It was, therefore, unsurprising that the return of shit to
a similar statue by a man occupying a position similar to our
cleaner’s in the prevailing racial order brought to light the
logic underpinning South Africa’s monumental rhetoric and
propelled statues into the centre of a national controversy.
Sculpted by Marion Walgate and unveiled in 1934, Rhodes had
stared out over an increasingly violent and unequal Cape Town
for almost a century (Makoni, 2015).
Chumani Maxwele’s emptying a bucket of human faeces onto
the Rhodes statue on the University of Cape Town’s upper
campus on 9 March 2015 and the ensuing media coverage of the
Rhodes Must Fall Movement’s successful campaign to remove
Rhodes from UCT brought statues to the centre of a much
broader discussion of the linkages between knowledge, the
institutions that validate it and South Africa’s racist heritage.
Metaphorically, the waste produced by colonial and apartheidorder builders like Totius and Rhodes was dumped at the feet
of Rhodes, of UCT and of universities in general. The abject
could not longer be repressed and universities had, finally,
to interrogate how knowledge’s production and validation
are linked to the production of dispensable life. In the public
realm, the separation of fact from value could no longer be
neatly disconnected from the production of value and waste.
Of course there were those who felt the need to take ownership
of and defend this heritage. Sunette Bridges and Steve
Hofmeyr were the vanguard of this defence. Bridges rather
unconvincingly chained herself to one of the Church Square
statues, sparking an avalanche of ’50 shades of khaki’ memes
on social media. Hofmeyr delivered a speech on the importance
of history to a true civilization, a simultaneous appeal to the
syndrome of discovery and the evolutionist telos of modernity
that cast any dissent as ignorant and regressive.
Faced with the comedy of the chaining, of Hofmeyr’s penchant
for malapropisms (his condemnation of the ‘deflowering’ of his
heritage) and photos of their supporters smilingly holding their
placards upside down on the front page of the Beeld newspaper
it would be easy to level a critical gaze at this group and dismiss
them as naïve fetishists projecting an ethnic fantasy onto
a set of statues. One could argue, for example, that Hofmeyr’s
Freudian slip betrays his concern for the virginal purity of the
fantasy constructed by men such as Totius. Under this gaze
Hofmeyr could be read as an ethnic patriarch defending the
fake facts of the nationalist mythology from being defiled by
the real facts of colonial oppression. But to do so would be to
slip into the fact/fetish dynamic that sees each side reduce the
reality of the other.
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But taking them at face value credits the omission of violent
interdependencies in keeping with writing Dias’s first shot out
of the Dias festival. Taking them seriously produces heritage
as something that, because it omits all the violence of colonial
sovereignty, naturalises current social fault lines by attributing
them to separate ethnically guided lines of development.
Taking them seriously subsumes all heritage in the old narrative
of separate development so that heritage itself reiterates the
colonial wound articulated by the students calling for the
removal of statues.
“As black students we are disgusted by the fact that this statue
still stands here today as it is a symbol of white supremacy.”
(Chumani Maxwele, quoted in Makoni, 2015).
“Rhodes has been praised for donating this land to the university,
building the South African economy and bringing ‘civilisation’
to this country. But for the majority of South Africans this is
a false narrative; how can a coloniser donate land that was
never his land in the first place?”
“The statue is a constant reminder for many black students
of the position in society that black people have occupied due
to hundreds of years of apartheid, racism, oppression and
colonialism” (Rambina Mahapa, quoted in Makoni, 2015).
The heritage association of South Africa responded to the
Rhodes statue controversy via Jacques Stoltz (2015), with
an argument that attempted to reset the reconciliatory
multicultural status quo.
Either way, the university (including the present
students) cannot wish away its colonial roots no
matter how hard it may try. Accepting the contested
nature of its history – and allowing for multiple
interpretations and voices – will in our view be the
best option to follow. If communities are offended by the statue (which
we accept may be a completely legitimate view) the
university should not attempt to expunge history
– this is non-productive and futile, but reassesses
its policy to ensure that its public space becomes
more representative of today’s democratic values.
This would be constructive and progressive. That
shouldn’t be too difficult given the significant number
of black public intellectuals our country – and UCT in
particular – have produced (Stoltz, 2015). Both of these positions aim to make the colonial wound
invisible. One aims to remove the inscription altogether, the
other aims to balance it with inscriptions celebrating ‘black
intellectuals’, which is what was done with the introduction
of Sol Plaatje on the Potchefstroom Campus. While such
juxtaposition may appear to journalistically balance the
ideological content of the space, the omission of the colonial
violence linking these juxtaposed figures comes to define the
space. The Heritage Association of South Africa’s suggestion
mirrors Ngugi’s early criticism of attempts to decolonize the
curriculum by inserting black authors into the canon according
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to unchanged aesthetic principles. The call to remove statues
and the call to balance them are ideologically similar inasmuch
as they only see statues as fetishes.
Zizek (1993:1) begins Tarrying with the Negative with the image
of the Romanian flag waving after the fall of Ceausescu with the
star, the symbol of the communist past cut out, leaving only
a hole in the middle of the flag where the star used to be. He
invokes this image to discuss the open situation, a situation
in which one symbolic order has fallen and no new one has
risen yet to take its place. One inscription has been removed
and no new inscription has yet taken its place. Zizek is clearly
operating in the textual metaphor.
To reposition statues of a colonial past as resources for
a decolonial future, however, requires stepping outside of
this symbolic universe of critique and fetish. For one thing,
overlaying a new democratically patterned blanket of meaning
over a city does little to reorder the task-scape of the city
derived from the largely unchanged relations of production
that derive from the colonial and apartheid eras. Task-scape is
a productive way of thinking about urban space inasmuch as
the urban landscape is the congealing, in statues, buildings,
routes and places, of the productive, reproductive, subversive
and disciplining activities that make up the task-scape
Treating the city as a text is tempting, but it would be bizarre to
be able to read as a text of liberation an urban geography that
continues to entrench urban segregation through not only the
distribution of housing, but the privatization of segregation
(Bremner, 2004) and the planning of transportation systems
(Czegledy, 2004). In the face of such a stubborn geography
a city text of changed street names and new statues hardly
seems substantially decolonial.
Zizek stumbles into the limits of the textual approach when he
goes on to say that the open situation he points to was a false
one as the coup that produced it was staged and that the old
political order had survived by casting off its symbolic clothing.
We have suggested above that the Dias festival and the shift to
multicultural ‘heritage’ it represents had a similar quality. We
wish to shift the focus from the hole in the flag to what was
made invisible by the arrival of the hole, namely the old state
apparatus that had staged this coup. If we treat the symbolic
order as a text comprised of signifiers charged with meaning
by those holding power, what Ingold (2002: 22) calls ‘cyphers’,
the hole in the flag can be celebrated as an open situation.
But if we shift register and treat the symbolic order as a crime
scene where statues are clues (Ingold, 2002:22), not inscriptions,
the hole becomes missing evidence. But evidence of what?
The most common response to calls to remove statues was that
people should focus on ‘real’ issues, like poverty, inequality,
environmental problems, state corruption, crime and so on.
This is obviously a logically bankrupt argument as it implies we
suspend everything and focus on the ‘real’ issues while ignoring
who gets to set up the list of ‘real’ issues. But to simply dismiss it
as a bad argument is boring and misses a useful insight, namely
that this response shows the potential latent in those moments
when statues become visible as clues rather than cyphers.
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The trouble with statues and memorials is that they
tend to obscure, beneath their impressive solidity, the
myriad connections they bare to past, present and future
entanglements. They have been historically useful because of
their impressively disconnected solidity. A disconnection that
enabled statues to be symbolically charged so effectively.
Riding this electrical metaphor leads us to a suggestion.
Anusas and Ingold (2015) begin their meditation on electricity
with a straw man that is useful to our argument. They begin
by charging, in the legal sense of the term, that electricity has
made us dependent and ignorant. We flick switches without
knowing where the electricity comes from or how it travels
to us, and life grinds to a halt when the power goes out.
This attitude to electricity mirrors the critical attitude that
suggests modern life is a false construction out of symbols like
statues, the removal of which will lead back to some sort of
authentic existence.
Anusas and Ingold (2015) respond to this charge with the
argument that electricity is not itself to blame; after all,
electricity is an unavoidable fact in the world. What is to
blame for the ignorance and dependence is the infrastructure
that conceals myriad wires and circuits and cables and mining
and transport and political corruption and engineering and so
on that make up the materiality of the grid linking us to one
another every time a switch is flipped. They conclude that
we should focus on what is obscured, the wires and
processes of generation and distribution rather than the
electricity itself.
For Mignolo, decoloniality, the project of delinking the promise
of modernity from the rhetoric of coloniality, requires building
a decolonial political society. For Rassool, the challenge of
public history is to enable new forms of citizenship in the
aftermath of apartheid. Following Anusas and Ingold (2015)
we suggest that approaching statues as metonymy rather than
metaphor, as clue rather than cypher, empowers the kind
of network thinking that decolonial public history requires.
As such a programme of adding the reality of these connections
to statues is a more promising avenue for enabling a new kind
of citizenship than either the current heritage framework
or their removal. The lost opportunity of the campaign to
remove Rhodes from the UCT campus becomes evident when
we see the statue was a point of entry into the link between
modernity and coloniality. Removing the statue removed
the point of entry without in the slightest affecting the link
because the link does not require a statue. Totius’ passing from
his pedestal represents a similar loss. The statue was removed
in the dead of night to protect it and to avoid controversy.
A potential battleground was removed before the battle could
get underway. And the link remained untouched. A battle was not
won; a battleground was lost.
So the challenge before us is to figure out how we can use
statues to render the infrastructure of power visible and afford
opportunities to gather contemporary concerns around them
in meaningful ways. The shift from metaphor to metonymy
enables a shift from therapy to care. Heritage as therapy was
grounded on the notion that trauma is located as a hole in
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the symbolic realm. By making room for hidden histories to
emerge multicultural heritage offered a kind of talking cure.
Thom van Doorn (2014) draws together the work of Puig (2012)
and Haraway (2003) to unfold an understanding of care that
we argue can replace therapy as the work of heritage in the
post-apartheid South Africa. Puig (2012:197) develops the
understanding that care is a threefold encounter with the
world that is simultaneously “a vital affective state, an ethical
obligation and a practical labour”. As an affective state, to care
is to be at stake in another. As an ethical obligation to care is
to become subject to another, and as a practical labour caring
requires actually doing something. But of course caring is
a compromised practice and Puig is quick to point out violentcare where caring for some individuals translates to suffering
and death for others. Care is grounded in the “inescapable
troubles of interdependent existences”. As we have argued
above, heritage as we know it has as a central feature the
omission of interdependence. Omitting the troubles of
interdependence leaves us only with violent-care. Removing
this statue here is good for them there but harmful to these
here.
Donna Haraway (2003:36) has addressed this problematic by
arguing that “caring means becoming subject to the unsettling
obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end
of the day than at the beginning.” It is this curiosity that leads
Haraway to ask, in her companion species manifesto, “Whom
and what do I touch when I touch my dog?” and to conclude that
touching “peppers its partners with attachment sites for world
making”. Statues have the potential to stand as monuments to
the inescapable troubles of our interdependent existences and
by transforming them from metaphor to metonymy they can
become the maps of those interdependencies that might guide
our curiosity, so that at the end of the day we know more about
our mutual dependencies than we did at the beginning.
Statues and memorials can be sites that gather up and map
the interdependencies of contemporary concerns and that can
perhaps provoke public engagement with those concerns if
their solidity is troubled enough that they provoke the question
“Whom and what do I touch when I touch this statue?” This is
quite literally a monumental challenge, but there is no shortage
of artists, intellectuals and other potential contributors who
can participate in transforming the controversy around statues
into the vital agora for a country that is deeply in need of one
vis-à-vis the spread of privatization and criminalization of the
public arena.
1.
DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING
INTERESTS
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
2.
FUNDING
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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3.
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